White House spokesman says attack is “of great concern,” but allegations still being investigated.
Residents move a Syrian Army soldier, wounded in apparent chemical weapon attack, March 19, 2013. Photo: REUTERS/George Ourfalian
Chemical weapons were used on civilians in Syria on Tuesday, Israel security sources confirmed. These sources did not, however, know whether it was Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime or the opposition forces fighting to topple him that used the weapons of mass destruction, after each party accused the other.
The US State Department earlier Tuesday said it had no reason to believe Syrian government charges that rebels had used chemical weapons in the country’s civil war, but said it was still studying allegations from the opposition that Syrian armed forces had used the weapons.
Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland called the charges an effort by Assad’s government to discredit its opponents.
Nuland, portraying the Assad government as increasingly beleaguered, said Washington is “quite concerned” that it would resort to non-conventional weapons
Meanwhile, the White House on Tuesday said it was looking carefully at allegations that chemical weapons were used in Syria, but said it had no evidence to substantiate charges that the opposition had used such weapons.
“We are looking carefully at the information as it comes in,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters. “This is an issue that has been made very clear by the president to be of great concern to us.”
Meanwhile, Britain’s UN envoy said on Tuesday that reports of a chemical weapon attack in Syria had not yet been “fully verified” as the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Syrian rebels of using chemical weapons near the northern city of Aleppo.
Syria’s government and rebels accused each other of launching the deadly chemical attack on Tuesday. If confirmed it would be the first use of such weapons in the two-year-old conflict.
“We have seen those reports, they haven’t yet been fully verified,” Britain’s UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant told reporters on his way into a UN Security Council meeting on Afghanistan.
“But clearly if chemical weapons were used then that would be abhorrent and it would require a serious response from the international community,” he said.
The Security Council has been deadlocked on Syria since 2011. Russia and China have refused to consider sanctions on President Bashar Assad’s government, and have vetoed three resolutions condemning Assad’s crackdown on opposition groups.
The conflict began as peaceful protests that turned violent when Assad tried to crush the revolt. The United Nations says more than 70,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million people have fled the violence.
The issue of how to deal with the movement or transfer of sophisticated weapons in Syria to groups such as Hezbollah or al Qaeda will come up in Israeli discussions with U.S. President Barack Obama this week.
Israeli officials will not publicly confirm or deny a report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that Israel’s leadership will try to persuade Obama – who is traveling to Israel and the Palestinian territories – to have U.S. forces carry out airstrikes against Syria if evidence shows sophisticated missiles are being handed over to groups both have deemed terrorist organizations.
But a senior Israeli official said, “Syria has weapons not even Iran has. We know where their weapons are and we are watching very closely. In prior discussion I have been in I have not heard a specific request to the United States in those terms. However, these sorts of issues have come up in discussions with America.”
Syria “is fragmenting and no one wants to see chemical weapons or state of the art weaponry that Syria has fall into the hands of al Qaeda or Hezbollah in Lebanon,” the source said, ending with, “We reserve the right to act in such a crisis. But if someone else would act we wouldn’t have to.”
On January 30, a U.S. official told CNN an Israeli air strike inside Syria hit a convoy carrying parts of surface-to-air missiles intended for Hezbollah. Controversy remains, however, as to what was hit. Syria’s leadership said Israel hit a research facility in a Damascus suburb.
While Israel has not officially commented on the strike, Israel’s then-defense minister, Ehud Barak, in January suggested during remarks made at a security conference in Munich, Germany, that Israel had a role in it.
Barak said, “I cannot add anything to what you’ve read in the newspapers about … what happened in Syria several days ago but I keep telling frankly that we’ve said – and that’s another proof that when we say something, we mean it. We say that we don’t think that it should be allowable to bring advanced weapons systems into Lebanon.”
Meanwhile, U.S. officials say a change on the ground inside Syria is necessary to change President Bashar al-Assad’s assessment of the situation.
Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. would not stand in the way of its allies arming Syrian rebels. His comments come as Britain and France are pushing the European Union to lift the weapons embargo in order to arm moderate Syrian rebels. Kerry acknowledged the need to change the military “imbalance” on the ground in order to change Assad’s “calculus.” Kerry made the remarks at a press conference on Monday at the State Department.
Last week, Syrian rebels told CNN that the U.S. is helping in organizing training in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons for Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Should Iran reverse its course toward further isolation and prove its pursuit of nuclear power to be peace-based, the possibility lies ahead that the nation will once again be positioned to “see the benefits of greater trade and ties with other nations, including the United States,” President Obama said in a video released today offering “best wishes” to the Iranian people ahead of Nowruz this week. The celebration of Nowruz “is an ancestral festivity marking the first day of spring and the renewal of nature,” the United Nations website states.
“Iran’s leaders say that their nuclear program is for medical research and electricity,” the president said in the four-minute statement, featuring Persian subtitles. “To date, however, they have been unable to convince the international community that their nuclear activities are solely for peaceful purposes.”
On Wednesday, the president lands in Israel for the first foreign trip of his second term. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who has sounded the alarm on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and threatened military intervention – is among the Israeli leadership with whom Mr. Obama will meet. Though the United States has long called for a diplomatic resolution to Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon, the president and his administration have said all options, including military force, are on the table should they be necessary.
“As I’ve said all along, the United States prefers to resolve this matter peacefully, diplomatically,” Mr. Obama continued. “Indeed, if – as Iran’s leaders say – their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, then there is a basis for a practical solution. It’s a solution that would give Iran access to peaceful nuclear energy while resolving once and for all the serious questions that the world has about the true nature of the Iranian nuclear program.
“…The United States, alongside the rest of the international community, is ready to reach such a solution,” he said. “Now is the time for the Iranian government to take immediate and meaningful steps to reduce tensions and work toward an enduring, long-term settlement of the nuclear issue.”
Mr. Obama said he has had “no illusions about the difficulty of overcoming decades of mistrust,” and conceded any serious resolution will require a “sustained effort.” Iran will be atop the president’s agenda in his meetings Wednesday.
Uriel Sinai / Getty Imagesconflict zones could be complete without a stop at Sderot, an Israeli town of 24,000 that stands uncomfortably close to the Gaza Strip. The rain of rockets out of the Palestinian enclave has made Sderot famous for two things: the thickness of its roofs (even bus stops have reinforced concrete tops); and the collection of crumpled missiles arrayed in racks behind the police station. As a visiting VIP in 2008, U.S. Senator Barack Obama dutifully inspected what the machine shops of Islamic Jihad and Hamasfashioned from lengths of pipe and scrap metal. Low-tech doesn’t begin to cover it.
It’s a long way up the Mediterranean coast from Sderot to Haifa, and even farther to the showroom of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., the weapons-development branch of Israel’s military-industrial complex. Hi-tech doesn’t begin to cover it. Rafael developed the first precision-guided munitions — the precursor to the American-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions that replaced “dumb bombs” — and scores of other battlefield innovations, from IED detectors to floating drones. But the company’s most acclaimed invention is the one now President Obama will inspect moments after arriving in Israel on Wednesday: Iron Dome. It is a missile-interception system that has performed what Israelis regard as a miracle, draining a good bit of the fear out of the wail of an air-raid siren. During the last Gaza conflict, which lasted a week in November, Iron Dome knocked out of the sky a reported 84% of the missiles it aimed at — that is, the ones headed toward population centers. The rockets headed for open space its computers simply let fall. Rafael executives are understandably proud of Iron Dome, which after a few months on the job is performing at the level of a system that’s had seven years to work out the kinks. But they appear even prouder of the unlikely philosophy behind it. To make the most-tested, if not the most effective antimissile system in military history, Israeli engineers took a page from the Gaza militants they aimed to frustrate. The secret to Iron Dome is that it’s cheap.
Consider the problem of volume. Since 2005, Gaza militants have fired more than 4,000 of their homemade rockets into Israel. Most cost a few hundred dollars each. Interceptors typically cost a few hundred thousand. “The main question that everyone asks is, ‘You’re firing a very costly missile against something very cheap,’” says Joseph “Yossi” Horowitz, a retired air-force colonel who markets air-and-missile defense systems at Rafael. “So our main mission was to reduce the cost.”
The economizing would be across the board, but the biggest savings were realized by reducing the size of the missile’s eyes — by far the most expensive component. An interceptor missile locks onto its target by following directions from the radar in its nose cone, typically packed with radio-frequency sensors of extravagant unit cost. An interceptor carried by a fighter jet has to be very smart, because it’s expected to find a missile being fired in its direction before it’s even in sight, one that could come from any direction. The nose-cone radar of an AIM/AMRAAM has so many RFs, or radio-frequency nodes, that it runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But a homemade missile coming out of Gaza is simply ballistic: it goes up and comes down. Rafael realized its launch and trajectory can be detected by ground radar, which would then transmit that information to the Iron Dome interceptor launched into the area of the sky where it’s headed. Only when the two missiles come near one another does the interceptor’s own radar come alive, guiding it to the incoming Qassam or GRAD and colliding with its own nose — where the warhead is positioned — in midair. It’s a delicate business, what with each missile traveling at 700 m per second.
“I can bring the interceptor in an accurate way, near the target, which means I can use the radar, the ‘seeker’ for a very short time,” says Horowitz. The shorter the time, the fewer the RF sensors required. “Saves money,” he says. How much? “Two digits: from hundreds of thousands of dollars to several thousand dollars.”
The savings mount up. Most guided missiles are made of so-called exotic materials, complex polymers designed to prevent the rocket from expanding or contracting as it travels through different altitudes. Again, not necessary for Iron Dome, which ascends only a few thousand feet. “Here we did it with aluminum,” Horowitz says. “Went across the street. Got some pipe.”
The result is visible in this extraordinary YouTube video from a wedding in Beersheba, an Israeli city of 200,000. The incoming missiles are not visible in the night sky until the ascending Iron Dome interceptors find and destroy them — again and again and again. “We can do more, but in this video we do 12,” says Horowitz, a reserve colonel in the Israeli military’s air-defense section. “You are not looking for the best of the best. You are looking for some optimization.”
At about $50 million per battery — the launchers with 20 missiles each, ground radar and command-and-control center, led by an officer equipped with an abort button — Iron Dome still costs plenty, especially since Israel estimates it would need at least 13 of them to protect the entire country. It currently has five. But the U.S. Congress voted about $300 million to help close the gap, which is why the Israel Defense Forces will truck a battery to Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday to be photographed behind the American President.
That no previous antimissile system has performed so impressively might raise awkward questions about the norms of defense procurement in other nations. (For David’s Sling, the Israeli version of the Patriot 3, the U.S. intermediate-range interceptor that costs about $5 million per interceptor, Rafael is partnering with Raytheon, an American firm, and still aims do the job for one-quarter of the cost.) But for Israelis, the more pressing question is how to define success.
Back to the Beersheba wedding. The revelry appears to carry on oblivious to the wail of air-raid sirens competing with the DJ (that song in the background is “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5). If Israelis no longer scramble to shelters, then Iron Dome really has changed the dynamic. It’s not yet at that point; schools still close when the rockets fly, and parents stay home from work. But Rafael’s head of research and development, who began work on Iron Dome even before the government thought to ask for it, tells TIME that its overarching accomplishment is that it can break the pernicious cycle of escalation that can lead to things like invasions. The batteries can liberate Israel’s elected leaders from the public pressure that comes with mass casualties. “The big success of Iron Dome is not how many missiles we intercept,” says Roni Potasman, the executive vice president for R&D. “The main success is what happened in the decisionmaking civilian population environment. The quiet time. Clausewitz used to say the mission of the military is to provide the time for the decisionmakers to decide. Now, if out of 500 missiles, 10 of them get by and cause casualties, a school or kindergarten, then this is a whole different story.”
The more stubborn problem is that, even though Iron Dome knocked down 400 of the rockets fired out of Gaza in the last round of fighting, Hamas acts as though it prevailed in the conflict. What’s more, polls show 80% of Palestinians think so too, while only 1 in 4 Israelis think their side prevailed. Israeli warplanes killed scores of senior militants and destroyed hundreds of missiles and launchers on the ground, including Fajr-5 from Iran. But Hamas and Islamic Jihad still launched their own version of the Fajr, dubbed the M-75, toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — unsettling Israelis who had previously considered themselves out of range and had not heard an air-raid siren since the Gulf War.
“[Gaza militants] were hit badly, much more than four years ago, but still I think they perceive it as a success,” says Potasman. “This is the Middle East. You see one reality, one side is looking at this reality from one angle; the other side looks from a totally opposite angle. That’s why we cannot communicate with them on a regular, normal basis, because you see on reality, and you look at this and you say, ‘Hey, what else can we do, to kill them? I mean, to kill them softly?’ And they look at this and they say, ‘Hey, we were able to hit Beersheba and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. So our understanding of the reality and their understanding of the reality is totally different. It’s not the same book.”
Extensive preparations by Syrian army units for launching chemical weapons against rebel forces have been sighted in the northern town of Homs, Western intelligence agencies told debkafile’s military sources Tuesday, March 19.
Damascus paved the way for resorting to unconventional weaponry with an accusation run by the state news agency SANA Tuesday that Syrian rebels had fired a rocket containing chemical substances in the Khan al-Assad area of rural Aleppo, allegedly killing 15 people, mostly civilians.
Rebels quickly denied the report and accused regime forces of “firing a chemical weapon on a long-range SCUD, after which 20 people died of asphyxia and poisoning.”
Neither of the accusations could immediately verified.
But a Reuters photographer said he had seen people come into two Aleppo hospitals with breathing problems after the attack. They claimed people were suffocating on the streets.
Western intelligence sources reckoned that for the Assad regime, Homs, the scene of fierce battles between government and rebel forces in recent days, is likely to be the first place where the Assad government resorts to chemical warfare. A rebel victory there would be a grave setback for the regime because it would sever the main highway linking the Syrian military forces fighting in the towns of Damascus, Latakia, Aleppo and Idlib.
Monday and Tuesday, therefore, heavy government reinforcements from the South and Damascus were piled onto the embattled town, along with large numbers of warplanes and attack helicopters, in an all-out effort to cut short the rebel advance.
debkafile’s military sources report that the importance Assad attaches to carrying the day in Homs is represented by the elite units he has assembled in and around the city: Heavy armored forces of the 4th and 5th Republican Guard Divisions were imported from Damascus and the 18th and 19th Divisions are there too, issued in the last few hours with chemical warfare gear.
Syrian ruler Bashar Assad can on no account afford to be defeated in the key town of Homs just when US President Barack Obama is scheduled to arrive in the Middle East Wednesday. He will therefore use whatever it takes to prevent this happening, even chemical weapons if they are the only answer.
The allegation that the rebels have resorted to chemical warfare strongly points to an Assad ploy to go there himself and maintain it was only after the opposition went first.
The emergence of dread unconventional weapons on the Syrian battlefield during the US president’s stay in the region is bound to dominate his talks with its leaders. It may even have the effect of altering his schedule and affect his itinerary
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel was ready for a “historic compromise” in talks with the Palestinians as he presented a new government that is a mix of centrists and hawkish supporters of Jewish settlement in the West Bank.
Speaking in parliament before the 22 ministers were sworn in, Netanyahu said that, while the cabinet would work to carry out domestic reforms that were the focus of Israel’s election in January, the government’s top priority would be “protecting the security of the state and its citizens.”
Joel Greenberg MAR 18
Israeli leader’s comments came as he presented new government.
He said Israel faced threats from Iran’s nuclear program and the upheaval in Syria, where he warned that stockpiles of “some of the deadliest weapons on earth” could fall into the hands of militants. He pledged that Israel would “take all measures necessary to prevent those weapons from falling in the hands of the terrorist organizations.”
Two days before a planned visit by President Obama, who is expected to explore options for renewing stalled peace negotiations with the Palestinians, Netanyahu struck a conciliatory tone.
“The new government in Israel extends its hand for peace with our Palestinian neighbors,” Netanyahu said. “Israel has proven time and again that it is ready for compromises in return for genuine peace.”
“With a Palestinian partner that is ready to conduct negotiations in good faith, Israel will be ready for a historic compromise that will end the conflict with the Palestinians once and for all,” Netanyahu added.
Still, key positions in his new government are held by strong backers of Israeli settlement in the West Bank, an issue that has stymied efforts to restart peace negotiations. The Palestinians have refused to resume talks unless Israel suspends building in the settlements, while Netanyahu has urged a resumption of talks without preconditions.
Israel’s new defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, a hawkish former army chief of staff, has backed building the settlements and retroactive authorization of some settlement outposts built without government permission.
On Monday, an aide said Yaalon opposes a settlement building freeze and other proposed confidence-building measures, such as freeing Palestinian prisoners, and believes that negotiations should resume without inducements to the Palestinians.
Danny Danon, an outspoken backer of the settlements from Netanyahu’s Likud party, was appointed deputy defense minister. The ministry’s approval is required for settlement expansion projects and Danon pledged in a radio interview Monday to promote them.
“The era of Ehud Barak in the Defense Ministry is over,” Danon told Israel Radio, referring to the outgoing defense minister. “We are committed to strengthening settlement.”
The Construction and Housing Ministry was awarded to Uri Ariel, a veteran leader of the settlement movement and a lawmaker from the right-wing Jewish Home party, which has a strong following among religious settlers. The ministry plays a key role in building the settlements, and Ariel’s appointment was interpreted by some commentators as a sign that such construction would now be given a boost.
Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign minister who heads the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which has formed a bloc with the Likud, served notice Monday that his faction would “emphatically oppose” any settlement freeze.
Lieberman resigned his post to face charges of fraud and breach of trust, and the foreign portfolio is being held by Netanyahu pending the result of the court proceedings. If Lieberman is cleared, he is expected to return to the foreign ministry.
It is unclear whether the centrist parties in the new Israeli coalition will press for reining in settlement building or act as a counterweight to the pro-settlement hawks in the government.
Yesh Atid, the second-largest faction in parliament, has focused on domestic issues, such as lowering the cost of living and ending draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, and its demand for a resumption of talks with the Palestinians is given only brief mention near the bottom of its coalition agreement with Netanyahu.
But the party leader, Yair Lapid, has criticized generous government funding of settlements, and Ofer Shelah, the party whip in parliament, told reporters Monday that Yesh Atid would work to revive peace efforts. “We want Israel to be active on that front,” Shelah said, adding as the second largest party, “we intend to use that power to help rejuvenate the peace process.”
Tzipi Livni, the new justice minister, has been appointed chief negotiator with the Palestinians, though her work is to be guided by a ministerial committee on the peace process that includes Netanyahu and Yaalon. A former foreign minister who heads the small Hatnua faction, Livni campaigned for a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians, and has pledged to put peace efforts high on the agenda of the new government.
The Syrian conflict spread in earnest to Lebanon Monday, March 18, when the Syria Air Force carried out bombing runs over Syrian rebel jumping-off bases inside Lebanon that are used for their attacks on government forces.
debkafile’s military sources report that the warplanes also bombed Lebanese border valleys used for smuggling men and arms into Syria.
The targets, between one and five kilometers inside Lebanon, were the town of Arsal, where many of the Sunni Muslim inhabitants support the Syrian rebellion, and the outskirts of the towns of Khirbet Younin and Wadi al-Khayl in Arsal’s barren mountains. No casualties were reported.
debkafile can disclose exclusively that Saturday, March 16, Syrian ruler Bashar Assad sent an ultimatum to Lebanese President Michel Sleiman through intelligence channels consisting of three stipulations:
1. Sack Lebanese army chief Gen. Jean Kahwaji without delay. Assad accused the general of refusing to deploy the Lebanese army for cracking down on Syrian rebel bases of operation in Lebanon and so stemming the flow of rebel strength into the embattled country.
2. The Lebanese president, himself a former army chief, was required to take responsibility for army action to purge the Lebanese border region of rebel forces.
3. President Sleiman was given 48 hours to order the Lebanese army into operation against the Syrian rebels. When this did not happen, Assad made good on his threat. As soon as his ultimatum expired Monday afternoon, he sent his air force into action across the border into Lebanon. debkafile’s military sources estimate that the air strike Monday was not a one-off event. Lebanon is probably in for expanding Syria air operations against its territory in the coming days.
It appears that the Syrian ruler timed his war action against Lebanon to coincide with President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel and Jordan, starting Wednesday, March 20. He may be planning further escalation as the week goes on.
According to some forecasts, Assad may be expected to launch attacks on Syrian rebel targets in Jordan as well as Lebanon..
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Joel Greenberg MAR 18
Israeli leader’s comments came as he presented new government.